Educator Toolbox

College Greenlight

Funded By: Cappex

Audience: Students, counselors/educators

Focus: College matching, scholarship opportunities

Big Picture: Dedicated almost exclusively to organizing a student’s search for college programs and financial aid opportunities, this elegant site is like a virtual college-prep backpack. Users must register—but once in, the site’s interface becomes a “dashboard” that allows students to store results of college and scholarship searches. As more results are stored, the user begins to accumulate experience in using the site and is awarded “caps” with progressive achievement levels (for instance, you start with a “newbie” cap). The cap collection is just for fun, but it emphasizes the site’s mission to keep students engaged and using the site’s powerful features.

Big Challenge Solved: The site cuts away all the clutter featured on a lot of college-prep sites and provides what students need most—an easy-to-use way to collect the most relevant data for their journey toward higher education.

Must Use: The My Colleges section of the tool not only offers students rich search features, but also makes it easy to compare key factors between schools, and provides a built-in note-taker and calendar listing of important dates/deadlines.

Most Unique Tool: Any one individual college listing provides one of the more intuitive and cleanly laid-out stats-and-facts pages we’ve seen. Once there, students can get a Fit Score that lets them know how well their interests match what the school has to offer.

Best Middle-School Student Tool: The site’s blog provides high-level categories through which to view posts—no advanced filtering or searching, which is actually refreshing. Students will find it easy to get schooled through written posts and videos.

Best High-School Student Tool: Based on their college search results, students can get a list of scholarship opportunities that they can save to the site. They can also rank the opportunity once they’ve evaluated it, prioritizing those that are the best fit.

Protip: For counselors and educators, the site offers similar services as those provided for students, but which also require registration—you’ll find the link in the lower right of the home page.